Ali Mercer

Writer

Category: books

My best reads of 2012

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The books pages are filling up with round-ups of what people most enjoyed reading this year, and here’s my contribution. Most of my choices are fiction, but there’s a bit of poetry and non-fiction in there as well – and only two books with a 2012 publication date. I tend to let the idea of a book grow on me, or go with recommendations or gifts, rather than struggling to keep up with all the latest releases… Or in the case of Game of Thrones, I watch it on DVD first!

I haven’t included Fifty Shades of Grey, which I couldn’t honestly say I enjoyed, though it did pique my interest, and it is currently the only book in the house hidden away out of children’s reach, so I guess that’s a testimonial of a sort. (Here’s my blog post about why I prefer Jilly Cooper’s Octavia.)

There’s plenty in the list below that has made me think, taken me out of myself, made me see the world differently, and, in some cases, prompted me to wonder how I could ever have left it so long before coming to the book in question.

Still, sometimes you just hit upon the right novel at the right time… So here are 10 of my favourite reads of the year, in no particular order.

1. Game of Thrones, by George R R Martin

I’m filled with admiration for this. The scope and boldness of it, the Shakespearean echoes, the vivid and entirely real characters fighting for survival in a fantasy world, the way each chapter is paced and shaped… Onto the second volume in the series now. Here’s an earlier blog post in praise of Game of Thrones.

2. Constellations, by Ian Pindar

My other half’s second poetry collection came out in May this year, and has just received a wonderful review (along with Emporium, his debut) in the TLS. Musical, beautiful, elusive, melancholy and profound. You can read more about it and about Ian’s other work on his blog.

3. Bing Yuk!, by Ted Dewan

This gets my award for the children’s book that gave us all most pleasure this year. My autistic son had spent a lot of time reading Jelly and Bean books with me, and they are amazing – he was able to decode them in a way that was simply not possible with other books. Then I read Bing Yuk! to him and he was absolutely charmed. (He is a much more fussy eater than Bing Bunny, who won’t attempt a tomato, but does like lots of other things.) ‘Bip!’ and ‘Sput!’ have pretty much acquired the status of catchphrases round here… Meanwhile, my daughter enjoyed the Harry Potter novels, which made for some later-than-ideal bedtimes.

4. The War Against Cliché, by Martin Amis

I struggle a bit with Martin Amis, simply because he was a writer that boys, or I suppose young-ish men, liked when I was studying English and they were too, and I couldn’t ever quite get over the suspicion that they had appropriated him because they felt that in some way he was on their side and not on mine. It’s something to do with that scene in The Rachel Papers… (I should qualify this by pointing out that not all the literary-minded boys I knew at the time were diehard Amis fans – just enough for me to feel slightly irked…) Anyway, I read this collection of prose this year and must admit, albeit reluctantly, that it is blooming brilliant. Dammit.

5. Heartburn, by Nora Ephron

For humour at the edge of heartbreak: unbeatable. Memorable for, among many other scenes, the description of how the narrator’s family made its money, and her mother’s expletive-peppered reaction to finding herself in goyishe heaven after a near-death experience (she promptly decided to come back to life).

6. I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith

I can’t believe it took me so long to discover this novel. Charming, dry, funny and sad coming-of-age tale in which the daughters of a helplessly blocked writer pit their wits against poverty, hunger and the inconvenience of living in a crumbling castle. A great book for any writer to read, since so much of it is about putting pen to paper (or putting it off).

7. The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins

Ian told me he saw someone walk down the street reading this, and then cross over without looking up and carry on along the other side of the road. Dangerously addictive. Very carefully put together so as to maintain your sympathy for a heroine who might just have no choice but to kill.

8. The Help, by Kathryn Stockett

Horrible Miss Hilly finally gets her comeuppance… and Skeeter gets the help she needs to tell the story she wants to tell. The stakes are high, but in the end the truth comes out… The plot is driven along by a plan to write a dangerous book in the face of an impossible deadline, and there is plenty of anxiety about the book’s possible reception. Seems to me that Kathryn Stockett wrote her own fears about the story she was telling, how it would go down with her readers, and whether she was entitled to tell it at all, into the heart of the narrative – and that combination of dread and compulsion is part of what gives it its power.

The Help, I Capture the Castle, and Neel Mukherjee’s A Life Apart, which I’m going to mention later on, all feature in this blog post about the way writers treat the subject of writing in their fiction.

9. Merivel, A Man of His Time, by Rose Tremain

I read Restoration, which features the same hero, back when I was still at school, and associate it loosely with A S Byatt’s Possession, pre-Raphaelite paintings, and going to see a French film in London for the first time (it was Gerard Depardieu in Cyrano de Bergerac, at, I think, The Lumiere). I’ve read very little historical fiction since, and I didn’t know what to expect from this new novel, which catches up with Merivel in middle age, but I certainly wouldn’t have expected a tale of queasy romantic compromise, near-starvation in Versailles, and a tragically thwarted attempt to save a bear.

… and some more great reads…

Top ten lists are a bit artificial aren’t they? It’s a format that lends itself to omissions. So here are some extras.

Bonus mention goes to The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler, which is about archetypal elements of stories – the relationships between the hero and characters such as the mentor and the shapeshifter, the trials and setbacks that have to be overcome on the hero’s journey. It explores the fresh twist given to age-old archetypes by films as varied as Star Wars, Pulp Fiction and Titanic, but when you start to look, you can see the story structures he talks about all over the place. (I spotted some in Stop the Clock! And now I know why crucial scenes so often happen in bars!)

Among other storytelling tips, I took away from this book the advice that you should be sure to have enough hazard in your fiction. A hero has to be up against it. Up against nothing much won’t do.

Also this year, I enjoyed my first ebook, though I read it on PC rather than Kindle so I’m still lagging behind the times: A Matter of Degree, by local author Beckie Henderson, a story of romance and poison pen letters set in academia, which opened my eyes as to what might be going on behind the scenes in higher education. Here’s Beckie Henderson’s blog about being a working mother.

I’m going to wrap up with a shout out to the writers who are mentioned in the acknowledgements to my first novel, Stop the Clock: Jaishree Misra, who has written six novels; Anna Lawrence Pietroni, whose debut, Ruby’s Spoon, blends magic with a Black Country 1930s setting, and tells the tale of a girl whose longing for adventure is granted when a mysterious stranger comes to town; and Neel Mukherjee, whose novel A Life Apart follows the stories of an Indian student in England and an Englishwoman in India. (Ian Pindar, my other half, is mentioned in the acknowledgements for Stop the Clock as well, of course.)

Final honourable mention goes to The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century Essays, edited by Ian Hamilton, full of gems like George Orwell’s essay on Englishness, and Martha Gellhorn’s account of Ernest Hemingway getting into a butch-off with a Spanish Republican Army general, in ‘Memory’.

My reading ambition for 2013: rationalise the books. They are everywhere, in tottering heaps round my desk, in the kitchen cupboards… The writing’s on the wall. Ebooks are the way to go.

In praise of Bond. James Bond

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I haven’t managed to see Skyfall yet… though I very much want to as I am a big Daniel Craig fan, and I feel I owe something – some kind of loyalty, perhaps – to James Bond. Not so much to the films, perhaps, though it’s hard to separate out what the ongoing life of Bond owes to his various on-screen incarnations from the part played by the books. But it was to the books that I turned as a teenager – and here’s what I learned from them.

Growing up in an all-female household and going to an all-girls’ secondary school had the effect of making me hopelessly curious about men. But where was I to find out about these strange trouser-wearing creatures? When I got to 17, I finally discovered the answer, which was: down the pub. But till then, I had to make do with books. James Bond became a formative influence, a sort of ghostly proxy uncle, offering, or so I thought, a sneaky insight into what men were really like, and what they wanted.

So what do men really want? Nowadays, I would probably say: a quiet life, with suitable technological entertainments to hand, a comfy sofa and an amenable companion. (Same as women really, no?) But in the world according to Bond, men wanted danger: the lethal ski run, the underwater swim round the villain’s yacht with a Geiger counter in hand, sex with the villain’s girl.

Bond liked to gamble, and drive fast, and drink, and did not like to lose, or ever want to settle down: he feared boredom much more than death, and was not at all domesticated. He didn’t even believe in garaging his car, because fumbling round with garage doors slowed you down and broke your fingernails and, anyway, cars ought to be able to start in the cold.

‘What every man would like to be, and every woman wants’ 

The blurb on the back of one of the Bond books we had at home proclaimed, ‘James Bond is what every man would like to be, and what every woman would like between the sheets,’ or words to that effect. I suppose there’s a subtle, but important, distinction between what one wants (the sofa and a good book), and what one wants to be, or take to bed (the fantasy the book contains).

My attitude to Ian Fleming’s books is muddled up with the image projected by the Bond films. Back in the 80s, when I stayed up late in the run-up to Christmas, sitting close to the telly with the sound turned down low to watch whichever Bond was on that year, the films seemed exotic, glamorous, and, well – sexy. None of which was particularly British – and yet Bond was.

This was the era of Moonraker and Roger Moore, who played it all a little tongue in cheek, not that I was particularly aware of that. I remember the villain with the mouthful of silver teeth, a bit of crocodile-hopping, the soft, malevolent hands stroking a long-haired white cat, and, of course, the Bond girl who slept with Bond and then didn’t wake, because she’d been covered in gold. I remember, also, piranhas in the pool, and one of those classic masochistic scenes in which Bond is pinioned, spread-eagled and about to face damage to a crucial part of his anatomy, although in the end his manhood is preserved.

Even though the image of the books and the image of the films tend to blur, the books have a quite separate life of their own. Here are some glimpses of Bond and his world from the books that particularly stick in my memory (and I can only apologise if my memory has reinvented them):

  • Bond was kicked out of Eton at the age of 13 after being found in bed with a chambermaid.
  • Bond’s secretary, Miss Moneypenny, is helplessly in love with him.
  • Honeychile Ryder in Dr No is not in a bikini when she emerges from the sea. (She has on nothing much more than a belt and a knife.) Her nose has been broken and badly set, and she instinctively covers it up when she sees Bond.
  • There is then a scene involving the sucking of sea urchin spines out of someone’s foot, though whether it’s Honeychile or Bond doing the sucking I really can’t remember.
  • The opening of Diamonds are Forever: very short, something about a scorpion, no Bond in sight. Life is nasty, brutish and short, is the message.
  • Tiffany Case, the woman in Diamonds are Forever: tough, vulnerable, survivor… but a Bond who took to family life wouldn’t be Bond, so even though he falls properly in love with her, she has to be written out.
  • A scene in a health spa in which Bond engages in some rather brutal one-upmanship which leaves a fellow guest with third-degree burns.
  • Patricia Fearing, who was, I think, some kind of therapist at the spa, and ends up experiencing Bond on the back seat of her bubble car.
  • Somebody (perhaps Patricia Fearing? Or Mary Goodnight?) who impressed Bond as potentially more exciting than the other women she was with because she ordered a strawberry daiquiri rather than something non-alcoholic.
  • Bond turning down the option of an emergency suicide pill which could have been stashed in one of his teeth.
  • In The Man with the Golden Gun, Mary Goodnight’s arm smelled of Chanel no 5. Chanel no 5 has been my favourite perfume ever since.

In praise of Game of Thrones

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Someone older and wiser once told me, ‘You can get away with a lot if you can do characters.’ I think there’s a lot of truth in this. One of the great pleasures of reading is getting to know people who seem real, even though they’re only made of words.

On the evidence of the DVD box set of the first series of Game of Thrones, George R R Martin can do a lot more than characters, but character is something he does spectacularly well. Maybe that’s part of why his fantasy saga A Song of Ice and Fire has exerted such powerful crossover appeal, and won over readers and, ultimately, an audience who aren’t all that familiar with the fantasy genre. (I’ve just ordered the first book in the series – can’t wait!)

Truthful characters, fantasy world

We’ve just finished watching the box set of Game of Thrones, having put it off till after I’d finished the first draft of my new novel. I knew it would be amazing – and it was. It’s a pretty unbeatable combination: the alien, unknown world that you escape into and get to know, peopled with characters who are absolutely believable. If the characters weren’t real, the fantasy might not seem so either; but because there’s so much truthfulness in the way they behave, you give yourself up to the whole of the world they inhabit. That little doubting, sceptical voice in the back of the mind that says, ‘Oh come on, this is ridiculous, it would never happen,’ is hushed, and you’re free to enjoy the ride.

Was the fantasy genre kicked off by Tolkein? If so, it really has its roots in everything that inspired him – Anglo-Saxon and Middle English, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Beowulf and all of that. Apparently there are dwarves and so on in Wagner (not that I would know, I’ve never quite managed to engage with Wagner, it all seems a bit lush and thundery). Maybe the fantasy genre ultimately owes a debt to Germanic folklore. Anyway, you can see bits of Tolkein in the DNA of Game of Thrones, but there’s a whole lot more sex – and a lot more women.

Girls, women, queens: powerful women in Game of Thrones

Tolkein did either elf maidens or Rosie Cotton, and not a whole lot in between. But Game of Thrones has Arya, the spunky girl who wants to be a boy, and the scary Cersei, who could be one of those fearsome Roman women, like Agrippina, who plotted and schemed to use their relationships with sons and other relatives as a way to wield power. There’s Catelyn, the resourceful queen, and her deranged sister Lysa, who breastfeeds her little boy, her only child, as they sit together on the throne. Perhaps most original of all is Daenerys, who is a weird combination of innocence and invulnerability, buoyed up by magical powers of which she herself is only just becoming aware. She is instinctive, intuitive, and, when she deems it necessary, completely ruthless.

Of course, the male characters are terrific too. Poor old Ned Stark is always trying to do the right thing, not that it’s easy. There are the snakelike, cunning plotters at court, Baelish and Varys; the psycho princeling, Joffrey, who is both cowardly and sadistic; fat, choleric, boozy Robert Baratheon; Daenerys’ hopeless brother Viserys, who wants desperately to wear the crown his father lost, but has no personal qualities that are likely to help him win it back, and few assets other than a once-feared family name and a pretty sister. There’s Cersei’s dashing brother Jaime and bully-boy father Tywin – played by a magnificently scornful Charles Dance – and best of all, Tyrion, who compensates for his lack of stature by being wittier, more insightful, more honest, bawdier, funnier and more commanding than just about anybody else.

Threat from beyond the borders and within

The story is full of threat. There is danger from the north, where the supernatural White Walkers appear to be stirring from a long sleep, and also from the south, from the nomadic, horse-loving Dothraki tribe, living just beyond a narrow strip of sea which they have never yet brought themselves to cross. The Dothraki are a fearsome lot, exactly the sort who lay waste a crumbling empire, and would have given Genghis Khan and his Mongolian hordes a good run for their money.

Perhaps a strong leader could rally the various powerful families of the seven kingdoms of Westeros and see off these dangers, but no. Nature abhors a vacuum, and a power vacuum is particularly untenable. The seven kingdoms have had a mad king, then a drunk, hunting-mad king, and beyond that the succession looks uncertain. There are internal factions, old grudges, uncertain loyalties, and one very big, incestuous secret, threatening to destabilise everything.

Not so very long ago…

Go back five or six hundred years, and that was pretty much what the British state was really like. There were pretenders to the throne; noble families battling it out for power or, the next best thing, proximity to power, and, on occasion, paying for it with the lives of their heirs; question marks over whether those heirs were really descended from their supposed fathers; strategic marriages; wars fought as displays of wealth and power; brutal punishments – amputations, beheadings, burnings alive – and, inevitably, less able sons taking over from capable men, and mucking things up. (If you can manage three generations of leaders who can hold onto the reins of power in such a set-up, you’ve got a dynasty that hold a rare and special place in history – like the Tudors.) It’s ironic that we tend to talk of the hereditary principle today as bringing stability, when history shows it’s anything but. If you want a stable state, you want stable institutions; have a figurehead monarch by all means, but on the whole, the less real power they have, the better.

Power and vulnerability

Game of Thrones is all about power: what people will do to get it; how they behave when they have it; how they survive, or go under, when they don’t have it. It’s also about love, loyalty and honour – and their opposites, hatred, treachery and betrayal. There’s a flavour of many different times and places in the mix, from the Wars of the Roses to the Ottoman Empire, where, if I remember my history correctly, the sons were kept locked away until the Emperor died, whereupon whichever one had the support of the army made it to the capital first, and the others were strangled with silken cords. However, having grown up a prisoner, the new Emperor would be barely fit to rule. This system limped on for a surprisingly long time before eventually collapsing. But it did in the end, as all empires do. I have to say, by the end of series one of Game of Thrones, I’m not filled with confidence about the outlook for peace and stability in Westeros, and wonder if its decline and fall is on the way sooner rather than later.

The landscape of Westeros felt recognisably like a reimagining of Britain to me: cold to the north, beyond the Wall, with a coastal capital further south, separated from potential invaders by a thin strip of water. But then someone else pointed out that North America also has an icy north and a hot South. Perhaps the geography of Westeros is just another way in which the Game of Thrones stories put a fresh spin on familiar patterns.

Watching the extra feature on the DVD box set about the making of the series, and the dedicated work of so many people – the animal trainers, the carpenters, the location scouts, and so on – it was amazing to think that all of this had originally been made up by just one person. That’s the potential power of the writer for you. A king can only rule a kingdom, more or less wisely and well; but a writer can create it.

Random new terminology I learned this week…

The comments in this week’s Guardian Review section about J K Rowling’s A Casual Vacancy included a couple of references to the Harry Potter stories as ‘low fantasy’, which I assumed was people being snooty about it, but no – it’s a whole genre of its own, in which fantastical happenings take place in the real world, as compared to high fantasy, where the whole world is fictional.

I also discovered, via Wikipedia, that there’s a narrative technique called sexposition – a TV technique for keeping viewers watching while you’re giving them chunks of narrative information by having some steamy goings-on for entertainment while someone explains it all.

My top seven novels about female friendship

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Friends, by my daughter

When I was writing Stop the Clock, I looked at lots of other books about groups of female friends that follow the outcomes of different attitudes to work and men and family life, and the decisions women make and how this affects their relationships with each other.

Here are seven novels about women’s lives and friendships that I’ve enjoyed hanging out with over the years.

  1. One I keep going back to was Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale, which I think is just terrific – funny, frank, sexy and moving (and full of relationships with men that don’t quite work out).
  2. The mother (grandmother?) of all these books about groups of women has got to be Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. OK, it’s about sisters, but still – different types of woman, different attitudes to how to be a woman, and to what sort of man and relationship to aspire to. I often think of the bit where Jo passes the manuscript of her book round, and people tell her to cut different bits out and it ends up getting thinner and thinner!
  3. Light a Penny Candle by Maeve Binchy. Her first. I still remember the cover, with bold red-headed Aisling and quiet blonde Elizabeth. That seems to be a common dynamic in these kind of stories – the go-for-it girl and the one who is more reserved but would secretly like to be wilder.
  4. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café by Fannie Flagg. A gutsy tomboy, a shy, lady-like girl, and a bad bloke. Warm, but also dark and surprising: southern Gothic. Cuts between the Depression and the 80s.
  5. Lace by Shirley Conran. Meet Pagan, the Cornish aristo; Maxine, married to a French count; Judy, the American magazine publisher; and Kate, the writer. Epic romp across decades and different countries, with designer luggage. (I wrote a blog post recently on why Lace is a much better read than Fifty Shades of Grey.)
  6. The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan. Brilliant telling of the stories of four Chinese women who have come to live in the US and their American-born daughters.
  7. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells. Again, looks at both friendship and mother-daughter relationships (the main mother-daughter relationship is pretty damn fraught, and the friends – the Ya-Yas – intervene to try to repair the damage). There’s a great scene when the troubled mother welcomes in a woman selling cosmetics door-to-door, who is hopeless as a saleswoman but also desperate, having fallen on hard times, and the two of them restore each other’s self-belief: quintessentially feminine.

Friendship and falling out in Stop the Clock

Good times bond people together– I guess it’s the honeymoon principle. Bad times, too, especially if you help each other get through them.

With old friends – the friends you make at school, or university or college, or in your first job – the history that glues you together is a compound of both the fun stuff and the disasters, plus something else; you come to define each other. The friend who knew you back then as well as now, who has seen you change, really knows you; someone you just met only sees the person you appear to be today. But change can mean distance, too; how far can the bonds of friendship stretch before they break?

The three main characters in Stop the Clock, my debut novel, are close in their mid-twenties, but their lives are set to head in different directions. Lucy, married and a mum, has no desire to go back to work; Tina is ambitious and career-focused; Natalie just wants to settle down with her boyfriend, or thinks she does. By their mid-thirties, they have ended up in quite different positions as far as their love lives and careers are concerned – but is the picture about to change yet again?

Old friendships – like any long relationship – sometimes hit a rough patch. (I still feel bad about ruining my friend’s egg poaching pan that her grandmother gave her. What can I say – in an ideal world, nobody would ever let me near a cooker.)

Stop the Clock looks at what happens when there are tensions between friends, when the goodwill built up over the years is put to the test. Following what happens to the three friends was a way of dramatising the different kinds of lives that women lead, depending not just on our choices, but also on chance – the opportunities that come our way (or don’t, however much we wish they would).

Lace: the comeback queen of holiday reads

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Lace by Shirley ConranAs school’s nearly out, here are my top three holiday reads of all time:

  • Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (which I read in Fuerteventura, 1995)
  • The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (New Zealand, 2000)
  • And… last but not least… Lace, by Shirley Conran (Cornwall, 1999).

If you’ve never read Lace, you’re in luck, because according to this week’s Grazia it’s being re-released this summer. So now a whole new generation of readers will meet Maxine, Kate, Judy and Pagan, and Lili, the film star who gathers them together in New York in 1978, and demands to know: ‘Which one of you bitches is my mother?’

There’s lots of glamour and wealth in this novel but a hard edge too; it doesn’t shy away from the sordid, though it doesn’t luxuriate in it either. It’s a big fat page-turning saga, with much more of a sense of history and place than you might expect, given its reputation as a bonkbuster; there is a whole lot more to it than sex. Its characters don’t just wear beautiful clothes and pursue high-flying careers; they belong to their times, and the times shape their lives.

The brief prelude, featuring a thirteen-year-old Lili, is pretty grim, and gives you just enough of a glimpse of her tough past for you to understand why she is so hostile when she meets the four women later on. And then you’re swept back to a Swiss finishing school in 1948, to meet the four women in the early days of their friendship, already with some foreknowledge of the troubles that lies ahead… I hope that makes it sound like a good read. It is!

Big 1980s reads: A Woman of Substance and The Thorn Birds

Lace came out in 1982, though I didn’t read it till much later. The book that made most impression on me around the time Lace was published was Barbara Taylor Bradford’s A Woman of Substance, which came out in 1979.

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A Woman of Substance charts the long climb of Emma Harte from poverty and shame to wealth and power – at a price. She is unmarried, pregnant and still in her teens when she leaves her job as a maid at Fairley Hall in Yorkshire, but goes on to build up a vast international business empire and take her revenge on the lover who let her down.  Now there’s a satisfying story arc – none of this business of marriage being the most a girl can aspire to.

That driving ambition is mainly what I remember about it. Emma Harte doesn’t have all that much luck with her men, and her children turn out to be a quarrelsome bunch, but she doesn’t let disaster lay her low; she comes back fighting and goes all the way to the top, and her motto is, ‘to endure’.

And then, of course, there’s Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds, published in 1977. The Australian outback! The priest! The scene where Meggie has to have all her hair cut off! The dress the colour of ashes of roses! Forbidden love! Why hasn’t someone filmed it? It’s nearly 20 years since the telly mini-series with Richard Chamberlain. You know what, I might just have to go track it down and read it again.

Destruction, revelation, survival: stories about writing

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They say you should write about what you know… and one thing writers know about is writing.

Here are eight novels in which writing, or the desire to write, plays a sometimes destructive, sometimes liberating role. One thing’s for sure, writing in literature is not a fast route to a happy ending. Often it’s done in secret and then exposed. Sometimes it brings the truth to light. Usually, for good or ill, it’s an agent of change.

Look out for artists, actors and musicians in fiction – sometimes they’re useful proxies. Journalists, too.

In my book, Stop the Clock, one of the characters starts writing a newspaper column which causes all sorts of trouble. Her friends think it’s about them. Maybe it is. They don’t like it.

Frost in May by Antonia White

After Watership Down by Richard Adams, this was the second novel that made me really cry. Nanda Grey, a Catholic convert at a super-posh Catholic boarding school attended by lots of aristocratic Europeans, decides to start writing a story, which she keeps tucked away out of sight. She decides to make all her characters really really bad, and into various nameless vices (she doesn’t know much about vice so this requires some imagination) in order for their eventual redemption to be all the more dramatic. How does it work out in the end? If you don’t know, I’ll leave you to find out.

Antonia White wrote another three books about the same character, and they’re all very much worth reading. The last one, Beyond the Glass, describes what it’s like to have a mental breakdown and end up institutionalised, which was something else the author knew about.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

So: a first novel about the writing and publication of a first book, with dramatic results. Skeeter has an impossible deadline to meet, and faces an impossible challenge: persuading the black maids she is meant to be writing about to risk sharing their stories. Still, if Aibileen and Minny help her, maybe she’ll make it…

Peyton Place by Grace Metalious

Until I read this I had the vague idea that Peyton Place was a wishy-washy soap opera. Then I discovered the book on which the long-running TV series was based. Published in 1956, it’s a pretty angry book about a pretty New England town where the falling leaves mask something nasty buried underneath the sheep pen… It’s like the world of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet 30 years later, where evidence of grimness lurks just beside the white picket fence.

One of the central characters, Allison, is a lonely innocent (played by a young Mia Farrow in the TV version) who dreams of becoming a writer. Her mother, Constance, grew up in Peyton Place, moved away, and then returned with Allison. Constance is doing her damnedest to preserve a facade of respectability, even though her relationship with Allison’s father (who worked in publishing) wasn’t quite what she would like others to believe.  And then Allison befriends local beauty Serena Cross, who knows a story worth telling, though for now she’s keeping it to herself…

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

Cassandra Mortmain is hungry and penniless, but she lives in a (rundown) castle and has a journal to write in. She also has a beautiful sister, a daffy stepmother called Topaz (a former artist’s model), and a hopeless father who wrote a cult hit years ago, but now hides himself away and produces absolutely nothing.

Cassandra’s journal is going to be exchanged for a succession of grander volumes as her fortunes change (but at what cost?) This book includes a scene described by Antonia Fraser as one of the most erotic ever written, according to the introduction. (I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say it is not explicit.)

A Life Apart by Neel Mukherjee

After his mother’s cremation Ritwik takes flight, leaving India and his brutal childhood behind for Oxford, where he has a scholarship to study English literature. One evening he is picked up by a stranger; he is afraid, but still goes along with the encounter, which is both vivid and dreamlike, absurd and otherworldly.

When he gets back to his college room a story presents itself to him. What if he were to write about Miss Gilby, the prim Englishwoman who made a fleeting appearance in a film, Ghare Bairey, that he had seen nearly ten years earlier?

Adrift in London without a work permit, he continues to pursue the story of Miss Gilby in India in the 1900s. She struggles to establish herself as a companion and English tutor to an Indian woman, and witnesses the unrest and resistance stirred up by Lord Curzon’s partition of Bengal into Hindu and Muslim states.

Miss Gilby, like Ritwik, is a migrant, trying to live in an often unreadable world. But will they both be able to survive the time and place in which they find themselves?

The Ghost by Robert Harris

By the time you read this… what has happened to the writer? If what you write fails to please, or falls into the wrong hands, what’s going to become of you?

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

The first Margaret Atwood I read. Features a story within a story within a story: but who’s telling what?

Why Jilly Cooper’s Octavia beats Fifty Shades of Grey

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The great thing about a paperback as opposed to reading on a Kindle is that it’s really easy to peek and cheat and skip bits. So: I peeked. I had a quick skippy read of Fifty Shades… and I bet lots of other readers, like me, have looked at it more out of curiosity than anything else. And will any of us re-read it? Surely many of us won’t.

So – it’s become a massive publishing phenomenon, and that kind of success puts it in the mainstream, even though some of the stuff in it is almost alien to most of its readers, and likely to stay that way. And it’s in the middle of a mad comment blizzard that shows no sign of abating.

  1. I do get what Suzanne Moore in the Guardian is on about. She sees it as regressive, selling the ‘old fantasy of romance’ etc. But is anyone really convinced by it as a love story? The emotions in it don’t come across as very real to me – they seem to be there as an excuse. Problem is, when feminists take on something like this it’s hard not to end up sounding like puritans or killjoys.
  2. Er, people… isn’t the fuss a little much? There was mention of someone in this week’s Grazia who’s actually scared to open it because she might end up so dissatisfied with what she’s getting in real life… It’s not THAT exciting, and some of it’s quite queasy making.
  3. How very English it all is… Rainy summer… Jubilee… The English vice…
  4. It’s a bit humourless, no? Cf Jilly Cooper’s Octavia, which I read when I was quite young and impressionable, which does seem kind of wholesome in comparison to Fifty Shades. It has a masterful hero, but a lot more character and story, some jokes, and a cute dog.
  5. But isn’t Fifty Shades just the teensiest bit absurd? She’s called Anastasia, for heaven’s sake, and he’s called Christian…
  6. This is fantasy, right? If she was busily submitting to a short fat bald broke bloke called Bob… well, she wouldn’t, would she? And to some extent, it’s a fantasy about money. So the super-rich want to be in  charge? Tell us something we don’t know.

The Fear Index and the inhumanly rich

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I bought Fifty Shades of Grey today, finally, but ended up reading The Fear Index by Robert Harris instead. With a banking scandal all over the front pages, it seemed the perfect time to start on a thriller about playing the financial markets (and what happens when that goes wrong).

Dr Hoffman, who is so far the hero, or anti-hero, is a physicist living in Switzerland who runs an extremely successful hedge fund and has become the kind of rich that separates you from everybody else. When a policeman asks what his company does, he says, ‘It makes money.’ He seems put out that anyone should have the impudence to ask.

When the policeman complains that he can no longer afford to live in Switzerland but has settled in France where it is cheaper, and has to drive in across the border, every day, Hoffman thinks, why should I care? But from the reader’s point of view it’s hard not to sympathise with the policeman as he tours Hoffman’s grand but unhomely property. Especially when he reflects that he’s probably going to have to work in his retirement to make ends meet, something neither his father nor grandfather had to do (surely lots of people know that feeling – pension forecasts can be pretty disheartening.)

From the outset, something is out of kilter; something doesn’t add up, and Hoffman knows it and is afraid. Robert Harris is brilliant on the entitled hollowness of the inhumanly rich; Hoffman’s house and office are curiously blank, fortress-like spaces that are designed as an assertion of power to keep the outside out, but can’t quite manage it.

It’s like the summer house where the journalist stays in The Ghost, which is secluded and detached from the outside world to the point of being like a prison, and also unreal.  He was another lonely figure trying to figure out whether there was really anything to justify his unease. It ain’t paranoia if they’re really out to get you… and in Robert Harris novels, they usually are, though you might just survive long enough to find out why.

The first Robert Harris novel I read was Fatherland, which is a great What if? story: what if Hitler had won a war, and the Holocaust had become a secret, and someone had then found out about it? After that I wanted to read more. His books are always about power – how people with power use it to try to control what other people know, how they respond to threats to their power, and what it’s like trying to work or communicate with powerful people and hold onto your integrity (and not come to a sticky end). They’ve got a real authority. You know he knows what he’s talking about.

The books on my windowsill

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Which books do you choose to have in the background if you’re a newbie writer and someone is coming round to your house to take a photo of you for public consumption? Here’s what I ended up with on the windowsill by my desk:

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. This has got such an amazingly addictive natural flow – I read it when I was writing Stop the Clock in the hope that some of it would rub off. So, ladies, who are you going to choose: the hot stuff with the motorbike who’s good at fixing things, or the remote, touch-me-not brainiac who plays the piano (and is stinking rich)? If only you could have both. Or alternate. Which Bella kind of does. Smart girl!

Stop the Clock by Alison Mercer. I’m hoping that people will find this book has a big heart but a bit of bite too. And some surprises… One of my friends missed her tube stop because she was too busy reading it. I hope others will find it as hard to put to one side as she did (though without being too inconvenienced as a result).

Daughters of Jerusalem by Charlotte Mendelson. I love this book, the characters are great and it’s beautifully written. There’s a spiky dumb sister, a brainy fed-up one, a rogue lech, a put-upon wife and an overblown academic who gets his comeuppance.

The Art of Fiction by John Gardner. My tip to anyone who is considering shelling out a fortune on a long creative writing course would be first to buy all of this man’s books on how to write, plus Stephen King’s On Writing, and go on an Arvon course, which is a week long, and see how you’re fixed after that. As John Gardner taught Raymond Carver, I’m inclined to take his advice seriously. He’s very peppery and expects you to do your work. (He used to lend Raymond Carver a space to write in, too.)

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. The book is really quite unexpected in places – there’s a scene that surprised me when I re-read it, where they go on the piss in London and end up in a brothel, or at least, a ropey club with girls who are interested in cash gifts. And then they do a runner and drive the wrong way up a road and end up getting nabbed by the old bill. It’s a shame that it’s sometimes perceived as glorifying fey posh youngsters in cricket whites when the sadness and yearning in it is about loss of family and friendship and youth, and trying to find or reclaim something from general disaster. But the imagery from various adaptations sticks!

Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. Elegant prose, the seduction of wealth, youth, sex, cocaine, searching out and laying claim to the people and places you want to belong to, being on the inside and the outside at the same time. One of my very favourites out of the books I’ve read in the last five years or so. I read it on the Oxford tube coming into London through Notting Hill – will never be able to see those big creamy houses and private gardens without thinking of this book.

Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle. A friend gave me this recently and I was completely charmed by it. The crumbly old castle and hunger and eking out the candles, the girls dreaming of escape, the useless old dad who just isn’t helping, the devoted swain who is nevertheless not quite the ticket… It follows a year through the seasons, with ever grander notebooks as the narrator’s fortunes change… it’s immediate and dry and funny, and magical and pastoral at the same time. Would be a terrific book to read if you were stuck in bed with flu, or bored of mummy porn and wanted something that is about sex but not explicitly.

Lynn Barber’s Mostly Men. I would hate to be interviewed by her. But she’s brilliant.

The Faber Book of Reportage, edited by John Carey. First-person eyewitness accounts of moments in history. Good for reading if you’re a bit stressed, as most of the moments are actually quite unpleasant, and make you glad not to be there.

OK, enough from the pile by the windowsill. More books to come! They are everywhere in our house, even in the kitchen cupboards.